James McBride’s ‘Deacon King Kong’ visits a bygone Brooklyn
James McBride’s new novel, “Deacon King Kong,” focuses on a New York phenomenon with its central character, who is sort of the unelected mayor of his neighborhood. And while McBride wrote about Deacon Cuffy Lambkin — nicknamed “Sportcoat” — from a specifically New York experience, he doesn’t believe the archetype is regionally specific.
“I think plenty of other areas in the country have that guy who does something,” McBride says. “He jumps out in the middle of a snowstorm and starts shoveling. If there’s a flood and there’s a car or a boat stuck, he pushes it down the street. He’s half handyman, half drunk, good-natured and a pain in the neck. I think those people make America great. Without sounding like a pundit, they’re the special Americans — in a real way.”
McBride admits “we have to be careful who we lionize — the stereotype today of a guy like Sportcoat is somebody who spanks kids, or a drunk who creates excuses to act irresponsible. But there’s a lot of denial in our world. And there’s a good reason for that denial. There’s so much painful material out there.”
“Deacon King Kong” is McBride’s first novel since “The Good Lord Bird,” seven years ago. In between, he wrote a bracing piece of music history with “Kill ’Em and Leave,” a book about the American soul singer and iconoclast James Brown. McBride drew raves for the Brown book, but clearly it took something out of him. He calls it “a labor of love” and also makes passing reference to the litigiousness of those Brown left behind. “Nothing in James Brown’s world,” he says, “is simple.”
Yet McBride dove into his next piece of fiction with ambitious aplomb as he also returned to his Brooklyn roots for the first time since his bestselling memoir “The Color of Water.”
With “Deacon King Kong,” he has created a story of panoramic truth, in which accounts of one big incident differ depending on the storyteller. He delved deep into the threads that connect different neighborhoods in New York — both in 1969, when the book is set, and through much of the city’s history. The interconnectivity of that city — with its racial and ethnic boundaries — is applicable beyond this story. But this story is an instantly engrossing way of detangling numerous tangled cultural threads.
“I just wanted to create a story with people who were sympathetic to one another,” McBride says, “without being corny.”
Without giving too much away about the path of “Deacon King Kong,” the story uses an incident more than a character for its epicenter. One day, Sportcoat — a deacon with a soft spot for a low-grade homemade hooch called King Kong — walks into the courtyard of a housing project in south Brooklyn, marches up to a kid he coached years ago in baseball who grew up to be a drug dealer, and shoots him.
McBride beautifully provides backstory
into each of the characters. As he does so, he gives a panoramic view of the housing project, the neighborhood and other neighborhoods on the periphery.
The story is teeming with information both sincere and unreliable, imbued with decades of stereotypes and lore codified through repetition. An early review of the book proves one of its points. The gun in question in the story is a Luger and the review referred to it as a .45. Incorrect information can move fast.
And the way information moves also speaks to the way McBride tells his story, with different characters seeing and hearing different things, each account creating a separate set of ripples that sometimes overlap with other ripples, while never merging into a wave.
An action in one specific social setting has reverberations far beyond that courtyard that reach into largely Jewish and Italian communities.
“I saw that as a chance to freeze the entire neighborhood and look into some of the corners we don’t often pay attention to. But Brooklyn — and other places can be like this, too — is a city of provincial small towns. Every block is a town. I don’t think we understand each other very well when we think of ourselves in big bunches. I think if you break things up into little bits and pieces, you get at it a little bit.”
And while McBride’s story concerns itself with an act of violence, his hope is that “Deacon King Kong” is more a call for greater connectivity. He’s no technophobe, but he does worry what gets lost in a technology-driven age.
“I think the age of the internet has done a lot of damage in terms of the ability to communicate with each other,” he says. “Nobody stops and asks directions anymore. You just GPS it. Nothing is gained there. There’s a lot that can be gained from pulling over in a strange place and asking a guy where President Street is. That interaction; I think that’s what we live for.”